No abstract

No abstract

A qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 26 older Dutch participants was performed to elucidate the complex relationship between religion and death anxiety. Whereas participants expressed seven types of lived religion (lacking, lost, liminal, loose, learned, lasting, and liquid religion), only participants with loose or lost religion expressed death anxiety. This supports previous research indicating that moderately religious people fear death more than nonbelievers or highly religious people. Moreover, the naturalness of death, the length of their life span, the death of others, the goodness of life, and the hope to live on in others also provided acceptance of death.

In Dutch discourses euthanasia has consecutively been viewed as murder, as mercy offered by medical doctors and as a self-chosen right for older people. This seems to reflect decreasing religious authority over death. Therefore, 26 interviews with Dutch adults aged 79-100 were carried out to evaluate the relationship between religion and attitudes towards euthanasia. Qualitative analysis indicates three groups of participants. Participants in the refraining group, wishing not to let the moment of their death be determined by euthanasia, predominantly believed both in God and an afterlife, and had most preference for a religious funeral. Participants in the depending group, wishing to ground euthanasia decisions in medical criteria, were least religious, which illustrates the co-occurrence of medicalisation and secularisation of death. Participants in the self-determining group, asserting that older adults should be allowed to determine themselves if and when they wish to receive euthanasia, were almost as religious as the refraining group, although they believed less in an afterlife. Their less traditional religiosity suggests that the late modern decline of traditional religious frameworks affords both self-determination concerning euthanasia and individual interpretations of religiosity. Moreover, our data suggest a connection between a persistent death wish in older adults and a perceived social death.

Grand narratives offered by religion and other worldviews provide a background against which people can narrate their personal life stories. Therefore, the extent of commitment older adults experience toward their worldview is expected to influence the narrative openness of their life story. Regression analyses based on a survey study among 356 older Dutch adults demonstrate that reconsideration of the commitment toward their worldview is associated with "narrative foreclosure": the premature sentiment that their life story is actually over. Moreover, the association we found between age and narrative foreclosure toward the future emphasizes the lack of vital cultural narratives of aging.